Medic

Thoughts On Current Weapon

Everyone who has even the slightest passive knowledge about this game knows that Medic passively regenerates health. However, what is significantly less known but very much impacts the class is that said health regeneration DOUBLES while healing injured players. Raise your hand if you knew about that! Oh, right, I suppose anyone coming this far to not only encounter this balance site but then also make it this far probably knows that. Oh well.

Reasons For Changes

For most players, they wouldn't have even known about this and nothing changes for them. For those who did know, Medic now takes a good deal longer to self-regen so he doesn't negate chip damage he takes so easily.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

It's no surprise that the Syringe Gun and its varients are as bad as they are. With them being Medic's primary, who shouldn't be going into combat, they should be worse than other classes to prevent Medic from being a viable combat class on top of his other game-changing abilities. However, I think pretty much everyone can agree that they shouldn't be so overtly unreliable and at least serve for moderate self-defense.

Reasons For Changes

With a passive reload, you can now finally fire some shots with your primary and then right back to your Medigun without having to wait for the whole reload to do so, and the accuracy and projectile speed buffs should make it much more consistent to aim without risking Medic becoming a combat class. It'll also finally deal some reasonable damage at close range with 150% ramp-up!

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Blutsauger has generally been considered the only moderately viable primary outside of the Crossbow simply due to how much survivability it can grant if you land your syringes (although I feel the Overdose is sorely underrated in that matter), even though it's still a syringe gun and has a passive downside. Normally, I'd like to just exchange the downside and address the Crossbow seperately, but my stance has changed: I no longer want Medic's weapons to have any combat stats to them.  Combat upsides as seen on the Blutsauger here result in Medic being forced and encourged to go into combat situations when he really shouldn't (Ubersaw in particular shows the worst of that, look at all of the Medics that see an enemy nearby and throw their life away because it's always worth the risk to get a quick Übercharge). Combat downsides on the other hand just don't fit on a class who already starts at a disadvantage in combat, so they ultimately become throwaway stats that either don't come into play if the Medic player avoids combat as he should, or results in the same conclusion of dying when he does - nothing really changed. I'm going to be rebalancing all of Medic's primaries and melees to try and avoid their stats from primarily affecting Medic when used in combat and instead affect his main healing gameplay.

With that all out of the way... here's my rework.

Reasons For Changes

This redesign takes full advantage of the name and allows both you and your heal target to get back health off of damage your heal target does, keeping both of you alive longer. However, it makes getting Übercharge take a few seconds longer, reduces the healing speed of your Medi-Gun at base, and cuts your passive health regeneration. You'll want to take full advantage of your newfound survivability if you want to make it work out!

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Crusader's Crossbow is undoubtedly the strongest and most reliable Medic primary. Not only does it reload passively, but it also hits way more consistently and can even burst heal teammates! As much as it makes Medic that much more fun to play, I cannot allow it to be an exception to my newfound rule that Medic's combat weapons shouldn't have combat-related stats, and this means starting with one major change:

Reasons For Changes

I have no intention of deviating from my rule that Medic's weapons should not differ in combat. For the Crossbow which is too radically different from the Syringe Guns to become one, that meant reworking it into a secondary alongside the Medi-Guns. With that out of the way, this version heals patients just 1 health point faster per second than the stock Medi-Gun (unless the shot was made from far away) and has a faster Übercharge rate. It also grants mini-crits like the Buff Banner and the damage resistances offered from the Battalion's Backup as its Übercharge. I cannot say with any confidence this is entirely balanced around the obvious higher skill floor it necessitates, but I do believe it will provide for a fun and fresh experience to Medic players.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

I really think the Overdose to be bland. Though the upside is alright in concept, it takes a long time to get going and requires it to be the active weapon, at the cost of a minor damage decrease on a weapon that you'd be hard-pressed to ever use for combat. Let's make it something more that doesn't alter combat.

Reasons For Changes

This new design is relatively simple - you risk it all with losing some max health and being unable to hide how much Übercharge you have saved up, but have the super powerful +25% more Übercharge from all sources should you be able to pull it off. For the Medics who like to live dangerously, here's to you.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The stock Medi Gun is probably the single most influential weapon that one can get their hands on. Unlike its counterparts, it has no "upsides" to speak of and has the slowest Übercharge build speed, but it comes at one advantage - its Übercharge is the single best buff in the entire game and it alone shifts the entire tide of the game if played right. I believe this core balance is okay, but there are definitely other abilities the Medi-Guns have that make Medic not just strong, but basically a requirement for the team to succeed. I'm going to have to be harsh about its changes.

Reasons For Changes

The debuff timer changes allow debuffs to have more meaningful impact on Medic's heal target and making them harder to directly remove, overheal penalties now work more properly, and the "crit heal" effect no longer builds overheal at an insane rate, but the more important changes are the remaining changes. Removing the ability to move as fast as faster heal targets - this single ability allowed Scout to be WAY stronger than he should be as a pocket and makes killing a Medic healing one significantly harder than it deserves to be, in addition to making rollouts a great deal faster than they should. Removing this makes it so that you can't just heal any conveniently nearby Scout to get a massive speed boost and making your speed more constant. Primary Fire is now a tether instead of a lock-on beam - the current system... is about as brainless as it gets. There is no skill or thought that goes behind trying to heal a teammate, and no penalty if you miss, which is one of the critical components that made Medic so alarmingly boring to play. By making Medic have to aim when healing, he now has more physical input into what he does besides who he's currently healing. Lastly, but still absolutely critical is the reduction of max Medi Gun overheal. Although overheal is neat and makes playing Medic have purpose when your teammates aren't damaged, having 50% more than your max health is a game-winning buff that, besides Übercharge, makes Medic so necessary for a team to have to win when the enemy also has one. Reducing the max overheal obtainable with Medi Guns has honestly been a long time coming if you ask me, although I wouldn't be surprised if it got a TON of backlash at any point in the game's lifetime if it were implemented.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

Though some think that the Kritzkrieg will become artificially stronger with the removal of random crits, I really don’t think it will. In fact, I'd rather go and say that the Kritzkrieg is actually somewhat overlooked as an apparently already perfect weapon that could do no wrong. Though it is quite close, I'd say there are two improvements to it that I'm sure almost anyone can agree with.

Reasons For Changes

The first buff makes other choices to gain Übercharge more viable when you have the Kritzkrieg rather than being equal across all Medi Guns (and therby tilting into stock's favor), and the second buff is catered toward giving Kritzkrieg users the same last hurrah tactic other Medi Guns get to use to their advantage - pop it, don't drop it. By being able to get critical hits on their other weapons, it will now be a better choice to pop uber before engaging in self defense rather than a waste of time that could be spent firing your primary or swinging your melee, making this tactic more universal.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Quick-Fix is meant for the Medic who wishes to keep their team healed up and ready for the next fight, while sacrificing max overheal and full invincibility with Ubercharge. However, due to the healing speed always being in effect, it kinda nullifies its own overheal downside and ends up being better at pocketing anyway, and the overheal penalty also has the issue of making the Medic never reach the health value where the reduction in Übercharge rate occurs, making it yet again better at pocketing than other choices. Finally, it also mirrors blast jumps and shield charges, which makes it basically impossible to catch up to a Medic who's... pocketing... yeah, I think you get the picture. Let's tackle these problems and less of a pocket king.

Reasons For Changes

Firstly, I made the faster healing use the existing crit healing system so that you can't heal people faster while in combat (especially when pocketing) while keeping its use of healing your team faster overall intact. The new Übercharge system also goes into this same niche by inheriting a similar system to the Vaccinator that allows you to either get a small burst of healing without using as much of your Übercharge meter, or chain them together for a longer effect. I also removed the mirroring of blast jumps/shield charges and properly set the Übercharge reduction value to correspond to the reduced overheal penalty. This should hopefully make it less of a nuisance to take out when fighting while making it a little more versatile on how it plays.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

As we all know from the Wrangler before it, high resistances can be a very steep slope when it comes to balancing, and the Vaccinator is all about adding ridiculously high resistances to protect from certain damage types. If damage types were a little more spread out, I might be more forgiving of the Vaccinator, but that is not the case. Almost all damage is protected by bullet resistance, with the very occasional changes to explosive and fire resistances against Soldier/Demoman and Pyro, respectively. And how much is the resistance? 10% at all times, but with the 4-bar Übercharge that charges 67% faster than stock, you get… wait for it: 75. Whole. Percent. That’s even more resistance than the Wrangler, and unlike the Wrangler, you don’t get any sort of “repair rate penalty” or be forced to utilize an immobile sentry gun. And that doesn’t factor in the fact that your patient might have resistances of their own! And then to somehow make things even worse, the Vaccinator Übercharge also completely protects you from all crit damage, making counterplay with weapons like the Kritzkrieg or the Buff Banner all but moot (and making headshots useless) AND even lets you do the objective when using the Übercharge. Just… how does a weapon like this exist?!

...whew, rant over. I believe with a weapon like this it's probably better to rework the weapon from scratch than try to balance its current mess.

Reasons For Changes

Type-specific damage resistances that are as high as the Vaccinator are just not for TF2, and that meant starting from scratch. This new design is simple like the Kritzkrieg, and simply charges faster but has an alternate effect for the Übercharge: reviving your teammates! If the enemy team makes an important pick or two that you need to reverse or you want to keep up a push, this Übercharge can let you do just that. It does put a line at reviving other Medics to prevent Medic stacking with a few having this Medi Gun from being unstoppable, but otherwise it should provide a fair and fun experience that the enemy team can still deal with due to the requirement to be in healing range, revived teammates having only half health, and the 3 second revival time.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Amputator is… actually pretty alright. The extra health regen stat has been a bit lacking ever since health regen was changed to build up over time without damage taken rather than being a set number, but even the Medicating Melody taunt alone easily more handy than the damage penalty is a drawback. Luckily, my mindset is one without such downsides, so let's get to work.

Reasons For Changes

Having the Medicating Melody effect be the star of the show seemed like the best way to make the Amputator stand out. With it being able to heal you and still do its job of healing other teammates, it can provide handy group healing and aid in your own survivability when no other healing sources are around - but this comes directly at the cost of Übercharge duration, meaning you'll want to make sure it's worth sacrificing the duration of your high point for the Medicating Melody taunt.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

As it stands right now, the Solemn Vow carries the problem of being a lackluster weapon that provides information that only sometimes comes in handy, and for the basically nonexistent downside of 10% slower swing speed. Here's what I've got instead.

Reasons For Changes

This new design keeps the idea of granting information at the cost of something else, and in this case, giving enemies similar information. You are now more readily able to see which teammates need healing and who hasn't taken damage recently to benefit from crit healing, but the enemy can now see an approximation of how much health you have and can pinpoint you in a crowd.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

I can do a wall of text explaining why this simple two-stat weapon is an absolute mess of a weapon, but to save everyone of yet another rant, I will just say that the Ubersaw is the absolute epitome of what I'm trying to avoid with Medic's primaries and melees - combat only stats that vastly overestimate how hard it is to land hits.

Reasons For Changes

These stats are simple - grants you an emergency escape option at the cost of Übercharge while making you slightly slower when you aren't under the effects, making it more difficult to keep up with a single heal target and making it slower to get to the frontlines without a teleporter.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

It can be very annoying to lose all your Übercharge on death, especially with the stock Medigun which takes the longest to charge. And yet, the semi-solution found in the Vita-Saw really doesn’t change much in the matter, pre-organ collecting or not. Mind, the downside rarely changes whether or not you end up dying, but it also doesn’t feel good to exchange that sliver of health just so that you can retain a minor amount of Übercharge. Time to rework it!

Reasons For Changes

This new upside works somewhat like an inverse of my Ubersaw idea which aims to get you instant Übercharge with the new ability, but makes you very vulnerable to getting killed whenever you use it and also has the same -10 max health penalty at all times. High risk, high reward.